Quote:For the 51 guests on board Air India flight 160 that touched down at the Indira Gandhi Airport here at 2 pm today, it was a special occasion. The Boeing 777-200 long range (LR) aircraft named Andhra Pradesh, is th e first of the 50 wide body aircraft AI has purchased.

The aircraft has many other firsts to its name. Andhra Pradesh became the first Indian aircraft to fly non-stop between India and the United States and also the first Indian aircraft to fly over the North Pole.
...

The aircraft took off from Seattle with 1.28 lakh kilolitre of fuel although only 1.001 lakh kl were consumed when it reached Delhi after flying non-stop for 14 hours and 18 minutes over Canada, NorthPole, Russia, Kazakhistan, Krygistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"In Delhi, the aircraft was welcomed with two fire engines on either side spraying it with water as it taxied on the runway. Finally, when the aircraft docked at the parking bay, the CMD and airline officials performed a puja before breaking a coconut before the aircraft."

I thought coconut breaking happens only for vehicles on the road... but I guess air travel is no exception.

Quite significant I would think, that our aircraft is close to the limits of it's economic performance at that distance.

enough to add tens of thousands of pounds of cargo capacity. Given DL and CO apparently both make good money to India, it can be significant. The real challenge for CO will be when AI and DL are both flying LRs to India, giving them significantly more ability to carry cargo which could translate into their ability to discount passenger traffic.

the US and India are moving toward Open Skies if they aren't there already... Open Skies removes all controls on airfares.

I'm glad for India's sake that they have got a carrier that will be competing in the world market. India - US traffic is huge and growing. You clearly need the right aircraft for the market and the 777LR is really the best aircraft for the job. I fully expect that DL and AI will command a large portion of the market and other carriers will find it increasingly difficult to compete as they have no cargo capabilities and leave bags behind on a regular basis.

The LR is probably best suited but Continental decided against purchasing it for commonality with the rest of the 777 fleet.

It makes for very efficient aircraft utilization but on short European routes it's a little too much aircraft and on ultra long haul routes it is weight restricted.

Even the regular 200 -ER is still a very capable aircraft though, and even more so since we uprated the GE 90's to 94K
and increased the maximum take off weight to 656k.

Imho I think we should purchase the 300 -ER which can outperform the 200 -ER and carry a great load at very low seat mile cost, that is the 777 of the future as the 787 will eventually supersede the smaller 777's.

The best contribution to safety is a competent Pilot.

25 Sammyk
: What sort of commonality issues are there between the ER and LR and is it a big difference?

26 CO787EWR
: Well its not that there commanility issues is that lets say you have a route like EWR-SIN daily with a small subfleet of 777-200LR's and one of your t

27 Karan69
: That is wrong 1 or 2 of AIs 744s flew their delivery flights from JFK-DEL about 10-12 years ago. [nothing against Bisera, i am just pointing out the

28 Aseem
: not gonna happen as AI will never give up stopover at ATQ and BHX. so we will have to contend with B772ERs.